


Sandman

by danjuann



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Canonical Character Death, Elemental Magic, Gen, Natural Disasters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:38:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danjuann/pseuds/danjuann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s nothing in the bestiary about this.  The wolves can't fight it, and the whole situation is way out of the hunters' league.  The survivors have evacuated the city, watching their lives burn on cable news stations.</p><p>Well, most of them do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sandman

His mom loved the sea. They have a service in Beacon Hills, mostly acquaintances from the Sheriff’s department and Stiles's school. Then Stiles and his dad drive to the coast together to spread her ashes in the ocean.

Stiles has seen The Big Lebowski, though, and very much does **not** want to pull a Walter. They sit on the beach for hours, talking, remembering, waiting for the winds to change before they can let go.

They never do.

They spend four days driving along the coast before they are finally able to spread her ashes. Stiles spends the majority of those days ignoring the developing sunburn in favor of watching his feet sink in the sand as the waves pull and push the earth around them. He watches the water swirl between his toes, ponders the striations of color that stain the sand. He watches, and he thinks.

He thinks about how water can cut through the earth, smooth it out, break it down into fine grains. He thinks about how the earth sometimes hurls itself above the oceans to create chains of islands where it pleases, how it sometimes splits in two and heaves the waters into massive tidal waves that travel for miles. He thinks about how the earth is dissolved into every drop of the salty ocean, invisible but ever-present, and together they sway to the silent gravity of the moon.

* * *

Years later, Beacon Hills is ripped to pieces. It starts with earthquakes, something at which California hardly bats an eye. They gain force, though, slicing fault lines through the city, creating sinkholes and rockslides and _quicksand traps_ , of all things. Then the monsoons come, along with the lightning storms, bringing flash floods that carry electrical current right into peoples' homes. Wildfires consume the woods, then get pushed by gale winds through the business district. People would say it was the apocalypse, except the devastation stays almost exclusively within the city limits of Beacon Fucking Hills.

There’s nothing in the bestiary about this. The wolves can't fight it, and the whole situation is way out of the hunters' league. The survivors have evacuated the city, watching their lives burn on cable news stations.

Well, most of them do.

Stiles travels out to the beach and fills an empty Coke bottle with damp sand. He drives back to Beacon Hills, finding his way around the barricades that are meant to keep people away from the inexplicable disasters. He pulls into the center of a ghost town and walks up to a tornado of fire. He pours some sand in his hand, holds it up in sacrifice, and he thinks.

He thinks about nature, about physical forces combining in such an improbably perfect manner that it gives way to life. He thinks about the way nature sometimes takes back the life it gave, swallows or burns it up to make room for something new or different. He thinks about how life evolves to survive in the most unforgiving environments. He thinks about magic, the frail tendrils that weave the connection between all forces, all life, and everything between reality, imagination, and impossibility. He watches the winds pull the sand into the fire, drifting away like ashes over the sea.

The elemental spirit chooses to die like a star, with one last explosion of insensible power. Yet the death of every star gives way to the birth of another. The spirit passes the echoes of its existence into the blood of the man who understood, who gave the offering of his emotions in remembrance. It won’t be for long – a few decades, a century at most. Yet, for a short time, life, magic, matter, nature, belief, and a hundred other forces of the universe will bind peacefully together into the single, unfathomable space that is Stiles Stilinski.

**Author's Note:**

> My new tumblr is [danjuann](http://danjuann.tumblr.com); come say hi!


End file.
